#10
1005 Words
Eryx.
I didn't sleep.
I sat in my chair, in the dark, staring at nothing.
That was new. I had never lost sleep over anything. Not wars. Not betrayals. Not the bodies I had put in the ground with my own hands. I had always slept like a man with a clean conscience — because in my orld, everything I had done was necessary.
But her face wouldn't leave me alone.
Please don't kill us too.
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth.
She had looked at me like I was the most terrifying thing she had ever encountered. Like I was something she needed to survive. Not a man. Not her mate. A threat.
I had marked her. I had given her something no other woman would ever receive from me. And she had spent years running from it like it was a curse.
Maybe it was.
I stood up and walked to the window. The palace grounds were quiet. Guards making their rounds. Torches burning low.
Everything exactly as it should be. Everything except me.
I was the Alpha. I did not pace. I did not sit in the dark chewing on my feelings like a wounded animal. I made decisions and I acted on them. That was who I was. That was all I had ever been.
But tonight I had chased after a maid through my own dungeon because her tears had landed on my arm and I had completely fallen apart.
Nobody could ever know that.
I rolled my jaw and turned away from the window.
She thought I had sent someone after her. That much was obvious from the way she had looked at me when she said those words. Please don't kill us too. She wasn't asking. She was certain. In her mind, I was already guilty.
She had called that night a mistake.
I had replayed every second of that night more times than I could count. The way she had walked into that cottage without knowing what she was walking into. The way she hadn't run when I told her to leave. The way she had felt like the only real thing in a room that was spinning.
A mistake.
I picked up the glass on my desk and threw it against the wall. The sound of it shattering did nothing for me.
I sat back down and stared at the broken pieces on the floor. Normally I would have called someone to clean it. Tonight I just looked at it.
She had a fake name. Selena. She had walked into my palace deliberately, with a story prepared and a face she had practiced. She wasn't here by accident. She had a reason and I didn't know what it was yet.
That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
Not because she had deceived me. People tried to deceive me every single day and it amused me more than anything. But because she had stood in front of me with those dark eyes and that fake name and I had still wanted to pull her close and never let her leave.
My wolf was useless. Completely useless. It didn't care about any of it. Fake name, missing years, husband, children — none of it registered. All it wanted was her back. It had been whining since the moment she ran out of the dungeon and it was starting to give me a headache.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
The children.
Two of them. A boy and a girl. I had seen them in the market. The boy had looked at me with suspicious eyes and the girl had been crying over dumplings. They had called her mom.
Something about that sat uncomfortably in my chest.
If she had moved on, if she had chosen another man and built a life, then why hadn't she broken the bond? It made no sense.
Carrying a mate bond with someone else's mark while building a life with another person was not something any wolf did lightly. It was painful. It was complicated.
Why hold onto it?
My wolf stirred at that thought and I shut it down immediately.
I wasn't going to hope. Hope was for people who had nothing else and I had an entire kingdom. I did not need to sit in the dark hoping that a woman who had run from me for years and looked at me like I was a monster had some secret reason for staying bonded to me.
That was not who I was.
I stood up again, walked to the door and pulled it open.
Cade was outside. He was always outside. The man barely slept.He took one look at my face and said nothing. Smart man.
"Double the watch on the new maids," I said. "Specifically the red haired one."
"To keep her in or keep threats out?" he asked carefully.
I thought about it for exactly one second.
"Both."
He nodded and I went back inside, closing the door behind me.
I walked to my bed and sat on the edge of it, resting my elbows on my knees.
She was somewhere in this palace right now. Sleeping. Breathing. Existing within the same walls as me for the first time in four years.
And she was terrified of me.
I had broken grown men in that dungeon. I had walked through battlefields without flinching. I had never once lost sleep over what anyone thought of me.
But her fear sat on my chest like a stone.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Please don't kill us too.
I closed my eyes.
I was the most powerful Alpha alive....and somehow, a small red haired woman in a maid's uniform had just completely taken me apart.
Her eyes haunted me. The way she looked at me wouldn't leave my mind. It was a foreign feeling I did not know how to navigate, but I still had to talk to her.
I need to.
- Writer
